An Open Conspiracy: The First DX3 interview

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1UP have the first proper interview with Eidos Montreal about Deus Ex 3. Phillip Collar talks to their General Manager Stephane D’Astous about the project. It’s an interesting interview, with much to think about. I’m sure the details will be picked over by Deus Ex fans. For example, this is fascinating…

And just one more example of how we’re trying to be transparent: this Saturday in Montreal, we’re opening our doors to do an Open House. We’re inviting the public, the families of the employees, and even the competition to come walk through our studios and see what we’re all about. In the future, if there are some fans that would like to come down to Montreal for whatever reason and go through our studio, it would be our pleasure to organize something. We really want to work closely, not behind closed doors.

Alas, that’s the Saturday that’s just gone otherwise we’d have worked out if any RPSites were in Montreal and sent an agent.

13 Comments

Open house game development is a brave move, certain fanboys tend not to handle face-to-face interaction or personal hygiene particularly well.

Also, as facinating as the internal processes and corporate ethos of Eidos are, more information on the game itself would be lovely- would one or two crudely hacked together screen shots be too much to ask?

I’m really growing to dislike all the preview stuff that surrounds the game industry. If they’re going to take two years to develop it, then fair enough, take your time and do it properly, but why start doing interviews? How can you possibly know what game it’s actually going to be in the end? And more importantly I just don’t need to know about it yet! Come back in 18 months.

I tried DX2 again a few days ago, after reading about DX3 here. It got stuck in an infinite loop when starting, apparently because it has trouble with multicore systems. The official solution? Start the game, alt-tab out and open the task manager, and set the main game process to run only fixed on one processor, then switch back. Do this every time you start the game. You’re kidding me, right?

When it worked, performance was poor (I got about as many frames as with HL2:EP2 on highest settings) and every fourth line of dialogue the sound ended abruptly after about half a second. Same with gunshots and other SFX. In short, I found the game so buggy that it was unplayable.

So, right now my enthusiasm for DX3 is down the drain. I might consider buying it when I hear, reliably, that it is actually a finished game.

It seems like he’s scared of receiving a backlash like that experienced by Bethesda over the announcement of Fallout 3.

I don’t know if its such a great idea to open the forums up at this early stage and invite comments about the way other people think the game should be played. At best it gives the sense of a leader who’s not totally certain in his decision-making and is craving fan approval, at worst its design by committee.

Frankly, I don´t see the point of announcing it now when is a 2009 project. If they have something big for summer I think they should have left the announcement for that moment and not for now when they have nothing. The attitude is positive, I like that, but it´s too bad there is absolutely zero information about the game or even the team.

I went to the open house. What do you want to know? They basically showed people through the office in groups of 5 or so and talked a bit about the company. It was the same sort of thing you can read on the website. The QA section was huge, because they plan on testing all Eidos games there. The developer area was also gigantic and all in a single open space. There were a lot of empty desks, but that’s because it has to accommodate 3 dev teams eventually, and they only have the Deus Ex 3 one now. The only office that actually has a door was D’Astous’ (and conference rooms) so there’s presumably a lot of that cooperation and inspiration that comes from being able to yell at an artist from across the room. For relaxation there was a punching bag in the dev area and stick hockey table in the lunch room.

I suppose you really want to know about Deus Ex 3 but I didn’t have time to talk to the Lead Designer and applied for a job there so should probably keep my mouth shut anyway.

Jon, I was about to disregard your comment until I read the last line. I have never considered the recruiting aspect.
As for the journalistic and consumer viewpoint, I do disagree. journalists care about *anything* that smells like news (why else is the story here?). And frankly, consumers are suckers for hype, so there is a big gain for the developers to generate interest in the game, so people will buy it;